Bucket List Item 4: Go To Diggerland

The other day, I realised I had a day booked off in order to recover from playing a football match. At my age, you need to prepare for these sorts of things. I also realised that if I didn’t plan anything for the day, I would end up sitting around in my Batman onesie watching TV all day long. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if I’ve got a day off that I’m getting paid for, it’s always fun to get paid for doing something cool.

So I text Jason to find out if he was off which he was, and so was Josh. So we ended up having a manly day out at the manliest place that I could think of.

I’ve wanted to go to Diggerland for quite some time. I was going to go with a friend a couple of years ago when I had a week off only to discover that it was only open on weekends and during school holidays. Which is a bit annoying, because to have it kid free would be amazing, although there weren’t many queues when we went. I’ll admit now, that I had very little idea what Diggerland would actually be like. All I knew is that they let you ride diggers and that was pretty much the selling point for me.

Oh my god, it’s the stuff of dreams!

I have never felt manlier than when in control of a massive piece of machinery and able to destroy things. It’s a pretty good feeling, really. I accidentally broke the rules. Apparently you’re not allowed to lift the bucket over head height. I may well have been told this but when in control of heavy machinery, pretty much everything I’ve ever been told is forgotten in my excitement. I could probably spend all day filling up the bucket on the digger with dirt and lifting it as high as it can go to just drop out all the dirt.

There are more things than just that though. You also get to drive tractors, robots, knock down skittles and go fishing for ducks! This really was my sort of theme park as the scariest ride we went on was getting slowly lifted 50 feet in the air. Admittedly this was because we wussed out of the Spindizzy but really, it did look quite scary.

Anyway, Diggerland gets 2 thumbs up from us.

I’ve got a new complaint

Kurt Cobain died 20 years ago today.

Nirvana were an important part of my youth. I could list all the reasons why I felt they were important and the sort of connection I had to them but it’s the sort of thing that has probably been done over and over in the 23 years since Nevermind was released.

What is more of interest is how long ago that seems, how old it makes me feel and the reducing significance that their impact has had on me over time.

I wonder if this is how our parents generation feel about the Beatles. They’re a band that I dislike for possibly the most stupid of stupid reasons. I don’t see anything original in them because everyone who has come since has ripped them off. So I find their music uninteresting. However, for my parents generation, they were the defining band. They were the ones who changed the way the world worked, which is how I feel about Nirvana.

For my 18 month old niece (and any children I hopefully might have someday), by the time they reach adulthood, Cobain would have been dead for about 40 years. That would mean he’d have been gone two generations. So much could have changed in that sort of time period.

It’s not just the next generations who won’t appreciate the significance of Nirvana.  There was a period when I probably didn’t go more than a day without listening to one of their albums. Now, I could easily go a year without doing so. What seemed to be the most important thing in the world at the time is clearly no longer so. I just don’t feel as strongly about them as I used to, although I recogise the effect that they had on my life.

There was a time when I thought that owning every Mansun EP ever released was the most important thing in the world. A couple of decades later, I can’t work out why I had that line of thought. The significance of these events has faded into the past.

When you look at children of today with their obsessions with the heelies and The One Directions and the pogs and the Spongebob Squarepantses, it is difficult to criticise them for being silly and just following fads and having stupid obsessions, as I did the exact same sort of things. I bleached my hair to look more like Cobain, I called my first guitar Mavis after a fictional character from a Mansun song and several other things that I have either forgotten about or am now too embarrassed to admit.

One of the things I find uncomfortable about with growing up is not that I have discarded interests out of choice, but that they have slowly lost their significance.

Past Stew wants to know what the hell is up with Present Stew and why he has sold out on his punk rock values. Future Stew will want to know why Present Stew even cares about this.

Present Stew just wants a dressing gown and a nice pair of slippers.